The kingdom of noise

The sun never sets in the land of the unbroken outrage. Dalit leaders and politicians of all hues have been outraged at Ashis Nandy’s statement, intellectuals in turn were outraged at the outrage over Nandy’s remarks and the call to jail him, Muslim leaders were outraged at Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam, and this in turn evoked outrage about stifling the freedom of speech. There is outrage about the fact that the sixth rapist in the Delhi gang rape case has been deemed a juvenile. We are outraged about Owaisi’s speech, Pakistan’s perfidy at the border, about Shah Rukh Khan who wrote something that created, for lack of a better word, outrage.

In the case of Ashis Nandy’s statement, any reading that takes into the account what he said in its entirety, would have to conclude, that he meant well by the very community that he seems to have outraged. Set in the larger context of his body of work, the outrage becomes truly mystifying. It is true that a particular sentence in what he said, seen by itself, could be misunderstood, but surely the problem if any, should be with what he meant, and not with an unrepresentative fragment of his argument. Of course, one could disagree even then, and denounce him for speaking loosely on a sensitive issue, but to prosecute him for something he said, even if that is not he meant, is ridiculous.

Apart from the rising tide of intolerance that we see around us, which has been commented upon by many, a role is also being played by media in the manner in which it chooses to and more importantly, is programmed to depict issues of this kind. The word is being confused for the action, and representation for reality. And television is the primary instrument of this confusion. Television needs to create a limited foreground and then intensify attention towards this narrow dimension of reality. Issues lose their meandering complexity and become pointed fronts, where issues are debated with the simplicity of objective-type questions and the fury of wars. Television is fatally dependent on things happening, and in the absence of meaningful events, words become events. Every statement becomes momentous and potentially blasphemous. The return of the idea of blasphemy, and the expansion of its purview from religion to all manner of political correctness has a lot to do with the growing primacy of media in our lives. Television breeds an air of intolerance in the manner in which it hunts down verbal transgressions. By virtue of picking up an infraction, divorcing it from context, and subjecting it to sustained and intense scrutiny, often in an emotionally charged and declamatory style, it makes us all potential executioners, a hair trigger away from outrage. It does not matter if the anger is legitimate in some cases, for in the overall scheme of things, noise is foreordained.

The trouble is that the opposite of manufactured noise is imposed silence. The state and the apparatus at its disposal cannot differentiate one kind of noise from another, and finds it safer and politically more expedient to impose pre-emptive silence. The political reward that accrues from the appeasement of a few is almost always deemed to be greater than the cost of foregoing abstract principles. When faced with protests, its instinct is to shut everything down. Stop the metros from plying, ask women to dress conservatively, close offices at ten pm for women, ban films that might attract inconvenient protests, prevent writers from attending literary festivals, in fact prevent them from entering the city at all, the list is a long one. In the case of the JLF, the organisers are being investigated for Ashis Nandy’s statement. Apparently, as per newspaper reports, they were made to sign a categorical undertaking that ‘the sentiments of no community would be hurt’ at the Festival before being granted permission to hold it. By all accounts, this is ridiculous; how can an event that celebrates artistic expression be made to give such an undertaking and how can organisers be held responsible for what a participant says? Essentially, this is nothing but a form of pre-emptive censorship where the organisers are being blackmailed into avoiding controversial subjects.

Between television and social media, outrage has become common currency. The people who come to the fore are those skilled at making noise, be they belligerent television anchors or flatulent panellists, bursting at every seam with unspecific anger. Outrage is a beast that needs to be fed quickly and visibly, but it is also one that is content with the illusion of substance. The power of noise is that it is self-sustaining. Not outraging against an assault on freedom like in the case of Nandy, Rushdie and Vishwaroopam is not an option, but doing so continues to raise the threshold level of noise in the system. Every subsequent protest needs to up the ante on the volume if it has to register.

In the kingdom of noise, deafness is the only abiding condition. When words stop being signifiers of intent, and get read as actions, then the distinctions between opinion and fact, representation and event become irredeemably blurred. If anything, the hierarchical relationship between word and event is reversed, particularly if the word belongs to a celebrity or is located in an event that enjoys celebrity status. The Jaipur festival is a victim of its own success, for anything that happens there is imbued with a sense of portentous significance. The keenness to cover Ashis Nandy’s statement lies in stark contrast to the desire to report actual atrocities against Dalits. Infractions involving words and representation invite punitive action more readily than infractions involving deeds. There is an inescapable asymmetry at work here – while media can only deal in words and images, the state deals in action.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Santosh Desai is a leading ad professional. He says he has strayed into writing entirely by accident, and for this he is "grateful". "City City Bang Bang" looks at contemporary Indian society from an everyday vantage point. It covers issues big and small, tends where possible to avoid judgmental positions, and tries instead to understand what makes things the way they are. The desire to look at things with innocent doubt helps in the emergence of fresh perspectives and hopefully, of clarity of a new kind.

Santosh Desai is a leading ad professional. He says he has strayed into writing entirely by accident, and for this he is "grateful". "City City Bang Bang" l. . .